I don’t have any tattoos. I’ve wanted to get one for a long time, but for some reason I always felt like any tattoo I got would have to be representative of my entire existence in one image and with that much pressure.. no wonder I never got one!

It wasn’t until about a year ago that I started, slowly, to realize that I didn’t have to get just ONE tattoo, I could get several… many even, if I so chose. Knowing that, I started thinking about what I’d like my *first* tattoo to be. I have decided on a peapod design with vines, two sweet pea flowers (to represent me and my husband) and three peas (to represent my kids). I collect “pea” related things so this is a perfect thing for me.

I spent some time last night pondering why exactly I like peas so much. They’re cute, obviously.. round little balls of joy, if you ask me…. but what else? There must be more.  I started thinking back and trying to remember ‘peas’es (sorry) of my life. The first thing I thought of was how the first time I ever had snow peas or sugar snap peas I was at my grandmother’s house. I have such amazing memories of my Grandma and so that was a great memory.  Then, when my kids were really small, the very first garden I planted had sweet peas in it and I still remember watching my little ones rush out to the garden and stand there on summer evenings picking peas right off the vine and eating them like they were candy. A few years ago when I’d made the biggest decision of my life (walking out of my marriage) and was living on my own with not a lot of money, there were nights I ate only a can of peas for dinner… and I loved it. So peas almost represent a sort of independence for me, too.

The last and probably fondest memory I have of peas are when my best friend (now my husband) spent an entire month making green craft balls into miniature peas of all sizes, some no bigger than the tip of my pinky fingernail.  He glued individual googly eyes on *EVERY* *SINGLE* *PEA*. Every single… pea. There were thousands of them, truly. Some bigger, some larger, but none bigger than the tip of any of my fingers.  Once he’d finished that chore of a project, he mixed all those little peas with plastic miniature snowflakes, tiny sleds, and small little plastic candy canes.  He then shoved all of those things into a small wooden box intertwined with battery-powered miniature white Christmas lights, turned them on and mailed them to me from North Carolina. They arrived at my house a few days later, and he was sure to tell me to open them in the dark so that the little lights he put in there would light up the box as the tiny peas spilled all over the floor.  In that one moment, I was overwhelmed. Any man insane enough to spend that much time gluing plastic googly eyes on green craft balls was the man for me.

I married him about two years after that and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

Yeah.. a peapod tattoo will be good.
July 25 at Integrity Tattoos in Royersford, PA by Justin Bolonski.

We’ve had some discussion recently among the local twitter community here at Penn State about how many people we all follow on twitter.. and why.  The consensus was that most of us try to follow no more than 100 people and all for the same basic reason… it’s not beneficial. At more than 100 people, conversations begin to become fragmented and you can’t really feel connected to more than that many people.  While this may not be the case for everyone, the majority of the people I’ve spoken with at Penn State feel this way.

It was interesting then, to read this post from ReadWriteWeb today discussing this very thing. An excerpt from the post here:

“Research by Robin Dunbar indicates that 100 to 150 is the approximate natural group size in which everyone can really know everyone else. “Human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people, judging from the logarithm of our brain size; and sure enough, studies of hunter-gatherer groups, military units, and city dwellers’ address books suggest that 100 to 150 is the natural group size within which people can know just about everyone directly,” writes Jonathan Haidt in the book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” drawing on research by Dunbar.”

The post also discusses the difference between the amount of friends a person might have on Facebook as opposed to twitter and for me there’s a difference.  I feel as though I could have a million ‘friends’ on Facebook and be fine with that because it’s not conversational in the way twitter is.  It’s like the difference between a dinner party and attending a Penn State football game. I’m ok hanging around with thousands of people as long as I don’t really want to get to know all of them. If I want to spend quality time with them.. then I’d prefer the dinner party.